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The Beatles turned rock music into art

By Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News

Posted:
02/09/2014 02:09:34 AM EST

Updated:
02/09/2014 02:09:40 PM EST

Elvis Presley had already been a cultural phenomenon. Phil Spector was sneaking some of those fusty philharmonic instruments into his Wall of Sound. Bob Dylan was changing the scene with some mighty serious stuff well before he went electric.

If we have to make any one act responsible for turning rock 'n' roll from teenage entertainment into a legitimate art, though, doesn't it have to be the Beatles?

Quite a claim for a band that came to America 50 years ago chanting “yeah, yeah, yeah” and “woo.” As history proved, however, that exuberant nonsense was just the start of a sonic assault that, over the next six years, would widen the musical intelligence of a generation.

Before them, pop music might have had its rebellious aspect, but the Beatles opened our ears to a range of sounds both past their prime and revolutionary, unknown to our culture and, in the end, the new definition of it.

It actually started with their first American hits, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” in that post-JFK assassination winter of 1964. The hooks and chord progressions were original, the harmonies thrilling without striving for sweetness. Rougher voices would emerge soon enough, but only after John Lennon and Paul McCartney established that you didn't have to sing super-pretty to be popular.

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Which was something Dylan had been pioneering in a more radical fashion. He was among the Beatles' early American fans, too, and has gone on record about how blown away he was by their guitar work. Safe to say that they were a key inspiration for the folk bard's turn to rock a year later, which established the genre's other great foundation as an art form?

Maybe. What's for sure, though, is that Dylan was instrumental in turning the Beatles from a fabulous act into a daring creative force. When they met in the summer of 1964, Dylan both introduced the Beatles to marijuana and, in some way, convinced Lennon, especially, to write more than adolescent love songs. The Beatles would develop social consciousness and, after their exposure to LSD in early 1965, an appetite for surrealism.

That was a pivotal year in the history of both the group and rock 'n' roll. The Beatles started to sound different; the string quartet on McCartney's “Yesterday” was something the kids hadn't heard, nor wanted to before, but they were happy to make “Yesterday” one of the most popular songs of all time. And at year's end, the Beatles released “Rubber Soul,” and along with Dylan's two '65 albums, it was a disc that changed everything.

Although the U.S. version of “Rubber Soul” was still primarily love songs (“Nowhere Man” was on the British release), they were more mature and complicated than before. The sitar on “Norwegian Wood” served as the West's introduction to an Indian sound, something George Harrison would soon make great hay out of after hooking up with Ravi Shankar.

After “Rubber Soul,” the album superseded the single as the dominant rock format. It became the way true statements were made.

“Yesterday and Today,” though a compilation rather than a concept album, bore a couple of thematic diversions and, though it was quickly recalled, an alarming cover picturing the lads covered in dismembered baby dolls and raw meat. They were smiling like they always had, but clearly itching to shake things up.

The Beatles' next one, “Revolver,” was distinctive musically (“Taxman,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine” pushed them further away from romance) and visually, with a photo-and-line-drawing collage cover that could be described by a new word entering the popular lexicon: trippy.

Then, in June 1967, “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” was the fullest expression of psychedelic weirdness that anyone had ever heard (or seen, with infinitely more elaborate cover art that, with the right chemical accompaniment, you could stare at for hours). Crack hadn't been invented yet. Didn't need it.

Innovative experiments with recording technology made it all seem like a suite of dispatches from a new dimension. Yet the band, while exploring topical territory previously unknown to pop songwriting, just as lavishly referenced an eclectic range of traditions from English music hall to raga to, on the epic closer “A Day in the Life,” a 40-piece orchestra.

Most of us never would have expected it, but it all sounded cool to us. And not just because we were so stoned we'd accept anything. Because it was the Beatles, acting like the be-all and end-all of music, and coming damn close to backing up that audacity.

The band was freed from all previous airplay considerations. The new approach “Sgt. Pepper” established grew richer, deeper and intriguingly idiosyncratic — as well as more indulgent and wayward, due in part to the guys' evolution from idols to gods — on the subsequent U.S. collections “Magical Mystery Tour,” “The White Album” and “Abbey Road.”

The Beatles' most powerful individual songs also date from the late '60s. “All You Need Is Love” arguably became the ultimate flower child anthem; “Revolution” perceived, before any song I can think of, why the revolution was not going to happen; Side two of “Abbey Road” was a cleverly cracked guide to the baby boomers' inevitable maturation; and is it too much of a stretch to call the free-association braggadocio of “I Am the Walrus” the grandaddy of rap?

Beatles or no Beatles, it's more than likely that the Who, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd would have made their mark. Would their most memorable works have been the same without the example set and barriers broken by “Sgt. Pepper”?

Those musicians and many others moved the by-then-established art form forward after the last, appropriately funereal Beatles album, “Let It Be,” came out in 1970. Spector didn't exactly bring the boys back full circle, but his syrupy overproduction couldn't cover up the fact that this was a collection of tunes, not startling ideas. The group's imaginative energy had been spent.

They called it quits for personal reasons and went their separate ways. But their work was truly done. Beatles songs have thrived for half a century. And despite the best efforts of everyone from metalheads to Justin Bieber, the best rock has been taken seriously for just as long.

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